Nearly a decade ago, AOL cofounder Steve Case was at a conference when a promising young entrepreneur “sheepishly” approached him to share how Case had unintentionally helped turn him into a coder.

As Case recalled in a recent interview, the man approached him and said: “I just want you to know that I learned to program when I was 13-years-old by hacking into the AIM system.”

The coder was none other than Mark Zuckerberg, then in his early 20s and running a fast-growing startup called Facebook. 

“He mentioned the hacking group he was part of and I actually remembered the name. They were one of the most notorious ones,” Case recalled in an interview this week on Mashable‘s Biz Please podcast, which you can listen to below or download on iTunes or Stitcher. “We had a team of people trying to protect us from people like Mark. but we were glad we could give him some experience in [his] early days of coding.” Read more…